A large percentage of cotton growing areas in the world rely on low-cost manual labor or custom harvesters to harvest crop. Most commercially available cotton harvesters are too expensive to effectively compete in these cotton growing areas. Although lower cost harvesters are available, such as the John Deere 7260 Cotton Picker and the Pamak Ptm2 tractor mounted picking machine, the transition away from hand picking and custom harvesting heretofore has been relatively slow. Some of the available harvesting machines are still too expensive to be affordable for small cotton operations. Maintaining cotton picker drum speed synchronization with ground speed for efficient harvesting can present problems, particularly in view of the wide range of tractors that may be used with the harvester and the large variance in desired ground speed. The need exists for an improved low cost, efficient harvester that easily attaches to a tractor, maneuvers well though small fields and follows ground contour well.